There are opportunities throughout the design process of any product to make significant changes, and ultimately impact the future of manufacturing, by embracing the digital thread. In this course, you will dig into the transformation taking place in how products are designed and manufactured throughout the world. It is the second of two courses that focuses on the "digital thread" – the stream that starts at the creation of a product concept and continues to accumulate information and data throughout the product life cycle.
Hear about the realities of implementing the digital thread, directly from someone responsible for making it happen at a company. Learn how the digital thread can fit into product development processes in an office, on a shop floor, and even across an enterprise. Be prepared to talk about the benefits, and limitations, of enacting it.
Main concepts of this course will be delivered through lectures, readings, discussions and various videos.
This is the third course in the Digital Manufacturing & Design Technology specialization that explores the many facets of manufacturing’s “Fourth Revolution,” aka Industry 4.0, and features a culminating project involving creation of a roadmap to achieve a self-established DMD-related professional goal.
To learn more about the Digital Manufacturing and Design Technology specialization, please watch the overview video by copying and pasting the following link into your web browser: https://youtu.be/wETK1O9c-CA

講師

Ken English

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[MUSIC] The fifth module in this course on the implementation of the digital thread focuses on the connections between the digital thread and the manufacturing enterprise as a whole. In the first lesson of this module, you're going to focus on developing an understanding of the role that the digital thread plays in enabling visibility and integration across the digital manufacturing and design enterprise. When you finish this lesson, you'll be able to speak to peers and management about the role that a digital thread can play in increasing transparent sharing of data and information across an entire enterprise. As a refresher, I want to return to discuss the overview of the digital thread. The digital thread is the concept of seamlessly integrating information throughout the value chain from planning to disposal. Technologies, processes, and standards all come together to enable a complete digital thread. Open interoperable software tools for design simulation, manufacturing and life cycle support systems. A key promise of the digital thread is visibility and integration using this strand of data throughout a product's life cycle. If we consider a digitally enabled supply chain, so we're moving outside the factory walls and focusing on more than a single part. Instead, we're focusing on an overall system, like an aircraft with multiple tiers of suppliers for actuators, engines, and other components. You can see how there's multiple supply chains that all integrate together into one final product. For large, complex products, there are many interrelated and interdependent activities, each essential to the timely and cost effective production of a product. Using a digitally enabled supply chain makes possible the optimization of that supply chain. As long as we have complete visibility into the progress of production, including product output processes and manufacturing capabilities between various vendors and suppliers. With businesses today being globally distributed, there are additional challenges arising from complexities in market demand, transportation, and distributed manufacturing. Managing this complexity requires real time dynamic sharing of data that's pertinent to the status of current operations. Including asset locations, manufacturing schedules, and emerging capacity constraints throughout the entire supply chain. Product demand patterns are becoming more volatile with increasing customization. Another way of looking at this is that rather than large lot size and long runs, production is increasingly focused on highly variable short runs of products. While traditional approaches to supply networks require significant assets be dedicated to carrying inventory in order to avoid supply chain interactions that represent both a financial burden, and create waste. Lean approaches depend on complete communication and understanding of production states throughout an enterprise in order to achieve maximum efficiencies. Digitally enabled supply chains can mitigate current supply chain concerns by Managing asset status including location, completion status, etc., using standards based information flows from a factory floor. Sourcing decisions may be supported by enhanced supplier exchange architectures to provide near real time insight into suppliers' and partners' current capabilities, capacity qualifications, and history of cost and quality performance. Advanced communication infrastructures, such as those typically associated with Web 2.0, can support increased capacity for problem resolution. Unlike traditional paper based supply chain approaches, digital supply chain approaches make use of technology such as GPS or RFID bar codes. Or smart labels and wireless networks to track the progress of products within the supply chain. Additionally, cloud based technologies and web services enable organizations to share the information seamlessly, and can pave the way for partner visibility and more efficient collaboration. Ultimately, the digital thread can provide the capability to identify any deviations from the ideal operation. A monitoring system can be configured to warn either the shop floor or an OEM of any anomalies that happen during their production process. This enables the creation of a closed loop system around the entire supply chain, where OEMs can be more proactive and assist suppliers when difficulties are encountered. In the resources section of this module, you will find some links to the efforts of the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute to promote supply chain visibility, as well as multiple videos on the topic.